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Are not Being and Reality (to on and he ousia) distinct; must
we not envisage Being as the substance stripped of all else,
while Reality is this same thing, Being, accompanied by the
others- Movement, Rest, Identity, Difference- so that these are
the specific constituents of Reality?
The universal fabric, then, is Reality in which Being, Movement,
and so on are separate constituents.
Now Movement has Being as an accident and therefore should have
Reality as an accident; or is it something serving to the
completion of Reality?
No: Movement is a Reality; everything in the Supreme is a
Reality.
Why, then, does not Reality reside, equally, in this sphere?
In the Supreme there is Reality because all things are one; ours
is the sphere of images whose separation produces grades of
difference. Thus in the spermatic unity all the human members are
present undistinguishably; there is no separation of head and
hand: their distinct existence begins in the life here, whose
content is image, not Authentic Existence.
And are the distinct Qualities in the Authentic Realm to be
explained in the same way? Are they differing Realities centred
in one Reality or gathered round Being- differences which
constitute Realities distinct from each other within the common
fact of Reality?
This is sound enough; but it does not apply to all the qualities
of this sphere, some of which, no doubt, are differentiations of
Reality- such as the quality of two-footedness or
four-footedness- but others are not such differentiations of
Reality and, because they are not so, must be called qualities
and nothing more.
On the other hand, one and the same thing may be sometimes a
differentiation of Reality and sometimes not- a differentiation
when it is a constitutive element, and no differentiation in some
other thing, where it is not a constitutive element but an
accidental. The distinction may be seen in the [constitutive]
whiteness of a swan or of ceruse and the whiteness which in a man
is an accidental.
Where whiteness belongs to the very Reason-Form of the thing it
is a constitutive element and not a quality; where it is a
superficial appearance it is a quality.
In other words, qualification may be distinguished. We may think
of a qualification that is of the very substance of the thing,
something exclusively belonging to it. And there is a qualifying
that is nothing more, [not constituting but simply] giving some
particular character to the real thing; in this second case the
qualification does not produce any alteration towards Reality or
away from it; the Reality has existed fully constituted before
the incoming of the qualification which- whether in soul or body-
merely introduces some state from outside, and by this addition
elaborates the Reality into the particular thing.
But what if [the superficial appearance such as] the visible
whiteness in ceruse is constitutive? In the swan the whiteness is
not constitutive since a swan need not be white: it is
constitutive in ceruse, just as warmth is constitutive of the
Reality, fire.
No doubt we may be told that the Reality in fire is [not warmth
but] fieriness and in ceruse an analogous abstraction: yet the
fact remains that in visible fire warmth or fieriness is
constitutive and in the ceruse whiteness.
Thus the same entities are represented at once as being not
qualities but constituents of Reality and not constituents but
qualities.
Now it is absurd to talk as if one identical thing changed its
own nature according to whether it is present as a constituent or
as an accidental.
The truth is that while the Reason-Principles producing these
entities contain nothing but what is of the nature of Reality,
yet only in the Intellectual Realm do the produced things possess
real existence: here they are not real; they are qualified.
And this is the starting-point of an error we constantly make: in
our enquiries into things we let realities escape us and fasten
on what is mere quality. Thus fire is not the thing we so name
from the observation of certain qualities present; fire is a
Reality [not a combination of material phenomena]; the phenomena
observed here and leading us to name fire call us away from the
authentic thing; a quality is erected into the very matter of
definition- a procedure, however, reasonable enough in regard to
things of the realm of sense which are in no case realities but
accidents of Reality.
And this raises the question how Reality can ever spring from
what are not Realities.
It has been shown that a thing coming into being cannot be
identical with its origins: it must here be added that nothing
thus coming into being [no "thing of process"] can be a Reality.
Then how do we assert the rising in the Supreme of what we have
called Reality from what is not Reality [i.e., from the pure
Being which is above Reality]?
The Reality there- possessing Authentic Being in the strictest
sense, with the least admixture- is Reality by existing among the
differentiations of the Authentic Being; or, better, Reality is
affirmed in the sense that with the existence of the Supreme is
included its Act so that Reality seems to be a perfectionment of
the Authentic Being, though in the truth it is a diminution; the
produced thing is deficient by the very addition, by being less
simplex, by standing one step away from the Authentic.
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